We are in the full swing of things now, the AMD64 platform is now PCI Express enabled. Motherboards supporting the latest Athlon64/FX 939-pin processors can now be purchased featuring the new PCI Express interface. For many months now fans of the ultimate gaming processor have had to sit by and watch a herd of new graphics cards hit the market. These graphics cards were untouchable for AMD fans, as support for the PCI Express bus was yet to reach their shores.

However, those days are over and the time has finally come for all those patient AMD fans. The long wait looks to have been worth it as the PCI Express bus will be finally put to good use. For months now everyone has been talking about the new NVIDIA SLI technology that will enable two selected graphics cards to work together. While SLI has created a great deal of hype, there are many catches to using this new technology and many users are simply turning to single card solutions. Nevertheless, SLI has proved that for users that wish to unleash ultimate performance there is no better option.

This new technology called SLI (Scalable Link Interface), allows a single system to combine two NVIDIA graphics cards to scale system performance. This technology takes advantage of the increased bandwidth of the PCI Express bus. Currently the ability to operate the GeForce 6600 GT, 6800 GT and 6800 Ultra in SLI mode is possible. While this technology has the power to almost double the frame rates when operating in SLI mode, you have to remember it will also cost twice as much to use. For example a GeForce 6800 Ultra SLI setup will cost around $1000 US for the graphics cards alone. This technology is however great value for GeForce 6600 GT setups, as it will cost no more than $400 US for the graphics cards.

These new SLI motherboards are no doubt going to be hugely popular for a number of reasons. First of all they bring PCI Express support to the AMD64 platform and furthermore they offer a flexible upgrade path. Although initially these SLI enabled motherboards will carry a fair price premium, their unique abilities are worth this price penalty. In order to utilize SLI technology there is currently only one chipset that will give a motherboard this support. Known as the NVIDIA nForce4 SLI, this chipset supports a whole host of new and exciting features. The nForce4 series looks to be the best NVIDIA chipset creation yet.

The list of features offered by this chipset is very extensive, covering everything from SLI support to built-in firewalls. While the chipset itself offers a wide variety of features, Gigabyte has also included a load of their own inventions to the list. Knowing very well that users after an SLI motherboard are going to want every flashy feature possible, Gigabyte have done their best to deliver with the K8NXP-SLI. The boards list of features is quite extensive boasting up to eight Serial ATA ports, Firewire b, 8-Channel Audio and Dual Gigabit LAN, to name just a few.